Yeh, the Book was Better, Then

Read a review (in The Economist, if I recall correctly) of Roddy Doyle's latest novel, Love, and was immediately reminded of The Commitments, a movie I'd reviewed enthusiastically back in the day (and was enthusiastic enough about, in fact, that I bought the soundtrack album almost immediately*). But I hadn't seen the movie in decades... and I'd never read the source novel at all.

Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis
Image from Wikimedia Commons

Well, even during a pandemic quasi-lockdown this was an oversight the Toronto Public Library could easily remedy. So I put holds on both novel and DVD and, since fortune brought them to me on the same day, I first read the novel and then re-watched the movie.

Sort of glad I did them in that order, too. It had been long enough that I had mostly forgotten the details of the movie (save for how impressed I'd been with the performance of musician Robert Arkins in the role of band manager Jimmy Rabbitte); this meant I could read the one and revisit the other without much in the way of pre-judging. And I'd have a better grounding in the story by which to judge how well (or not) it had been adapted to film, keeping in mind that Doyle was one of the screenwriters for the latter.

The Cosmic Jukebox?

 A few days ago I finished reading Electric Shock, a not-quite comprehensive history of recorded popular music, written by the British journalist Peter Doggett. I highly recommend the book, despite a few blind spots displayed by the author (and too much attention paid, so far as I'm concerned, to British band-leaders in the period between the world wars... and really to British pop music overall), and I am completely blaming Doggett for the fact I've done virtually no writing at all in September.

The reason for this is buried near the end of the acknowledgments at the end of the book (and we're talking about 736 pages here, including the index), where Doggett comments that through YouTube he was able to listen to every top-selling record ever released. And we're talking about songs recorded as long ago as 1890.

So I thought I'd spend a little time trying to verify his claim. And yep, so far he seems to be right.

John Philip Sousa? Check, an 1890 recording of Semper Fidelis by the US Marine Corps Band.

Recording of the first true "pop" song? Check, an 1893 recording of "After the Ball" by George G. Gaskin. (I don't advise listening to this one; it's puerile mush, really. Not unlike most of the work of Max Martin.)

First recording superstar? Oh, absolutely. YouTube is chock full of the early records (and they were all early records, 'cause the man died in 1921) of... Enrico Caruso. Man released nearly 250 records in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and he had a contract (with Victor) that paid him $2,000 a year just as a retainer. The estimate is that he earned something like five million dollars from those 247 records. That's the equivalent, today, of about $138 million.

But I digress.